Shi Baohua opened her eyes. She was in a hospital bed, but she had no idea how she got there.

Clearly, though, she was in bad shape. Her spine was fractured; a few broken ribs had forced their way into her lungs; her wrists were broken and dislocated; and her clavicle was swollen purple.

She had spent six days in a coma, after falling from a third-floor balcony, her daughter, Qin Lili, told her. But Shi had no memory of that, much less an inclination to do such a thing on purpose.

Gradually, some memories streamed back. It was 2019. A week before, her daughter and son-in-law had come to visit her. But they had been followed.

Police came and grabbed her son-in-law. Her daughter managed to lock the door and tried to reason with the police. Shi remembered rushing to the back room to hastily pack and hide the printers and all the Falun Gong materials already printed out. Then, nothing.

When Qin went into the back room, she was blocked by the police. Her mother was gone. Did they push her off the balcony? To this day, the family doesn’t know.

Shi’s story is but a drop in the sea of senseless repression in today’s China—a totalitarian surveillance state where possession of dissident literature can land one in prison for years, often tortured to the brink of death, or slaughtered outright, with one’s organs sold to the highest bidder.

Shi refused to accept such a fate. Incapacitated as she was, she started to contemplate her escape from the hospital.

“I was still not very clearheaded, but I had an intense feeling that I couldn’t be there,” she told The Epoch Times.

But officers from the 610 Office, an extrajudicial, Gestapo-like agency tasked with suppressing the Falun Gong faith group, were monitoring her hospital room and had instructed the doctors to do the same.

The family waited for the 610 officers to take a break, then carried Shi out of the hospital. Nobody stopped them.

They loaded her broken body into a car and drove her to her daughter’s home in another city. Within two months, she had almost completely recovered, a fact she credited to her faith and persistence in doing Falun Gong’s Taichi-like exercises.

By this time, Shi was accustomed to living as a fugitive. Since the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) launched the persecution of Falun Gong in 1999, Shi had been arrested five times.

The Epoch Times spoke with Shi and other Falun Gong practitioners ahead of July 20, the date marking 26 years of persecution against the spiritual group in China.

The Regime Follows No Law

The persecution doesn’t make any sense, said Shi and others interviewed for this story. Falun Gong practitioners just want to do their exercises and live by their tenets of truth, compassion, and forbearance. But when then-CCP leader Jiang Zemin found out that 70 million to 100 million Chinese had picked up the practice—exceeding even the Party’s own membership—he ordered Falun Gong “eradicated.”

On July 20, 1999, tens of millions of law-abiding Chinese citizens became enemies of the state overnight. Reports of mass arrests, arbitrary detention, and torture soon followed. Years later, several independent investigations concluded that the regime had been using Falun Gong prisoners as an on-demand source of organs for China’s burgeoning transplant industry.

In 2009, Shi’s family started to print materials about Falun Gong and the persecution and deliver them to other Falun Gong practitioners for distribution. Shi didn’t use cell phones, aware of the regime’s surveillance capabilities.

Still, their printing operation was eventually sniffed out. One day, in January 2016, police broke into their apartment. Shi wasn’t home, but Qin was there; she was arrested right in front of her 1-year-old son.

Shortly before that day, police had followed Shi as she was delivering Falun Gong materials with a friend, also a Falun Gong practitioner. The two hurried into another practitioner’s home to hide the materials. The police came close behind, carrying an axe to break the door lock.

“When it comes to Falun Gong, the CCP follows no laws. They arrest people and send them to prison at will,” Shi said. “They are just like bandits.”

As the police entered, Shi and her companion slipped out through a window. Taking off their shoes, Shi and her friend climbed the tiled roof of a barn and slid down a 10-foot courtyard wall with the help of a neighbor, who stacked up two wobbly chairs on the other side. Moments after, they heard the confused voices of the police, who were puzzled over the duo’s disappearing act. The two stayed in the neighbor’s shed, Shi’s teeth chattering in cold and fear, until 4 a.m., when they could finally run off.

After that, Shi went into hiding. Over the next eight years, she moved 19 times across six cities, looking for places with thinner camera surveillance or in the countryside.

Unable to produce her ID for fear of alerting the police, she would rent a small apartment or a countryside bungalow under the table. The government cut off her pension, so she minimized her expenses to stretch her savings. Spinach was cheap, so she ate it for months. Sometimes she would go to greenhouses in the countryside to pick up vegetables that the farmers had thrown away. Winters were especially harsh, with minimal heating, as she was reluctant to waste money on coal.

She used an overseas software tool to break through the regime’s internet censorship and sent sporadic encrypted messages to her daughter. Once or twice a year, her daughter would try to visit her—posing a great risk, despite the two taking various precautions.

“It was such a conflicted feeling, wanting to stay close to my mom, but at the same time needing to keep her safe,” Qin said, describing theirs as a “guerilla lifestyle.”

Still, Shi said, she didn’t live in fear. Standing strong in her faith, she continued to produce and distribute Falun Gong materials.

A large but hard-to-determine number of Falun Gong practitioners live in the same way. The Epoch Times interviewed a half a dozen who had similar experiences.

Unpersoned

Hunter Wang was forced to go on the run for more than a decade after he was detained for practicing Falun Gong in 2005.

The police confiscated his ID at the time, leaving him cut off from much of Chinese society.

In the early 2000s, he recalled, it was still possible to board a train without showing an ID. But with the proliferation of high-speed trains, ID requirements expanded. Ultimately, ID was even required for bus travel. To take the subway, he avoided certain hours when policemen were known to be around and constantly checked if an officer happened to be near.

He was able to get a carbon copy of his ID from his parents, which allowed him to sign a lease agreement. In most cases, however, a copy wasn’t acceptable.

To travel, he scouted small bus stops where ID checks were lax. In 2015, Wang had to change jobs five times because he couldn’t produce his ID. Applying for a new card was out of the question, given that the regime considered him a fugitive.

Anonymity was short-lived each time he moved to a new house. The local neighborhood CCP committee would regularly check in, asking for an ID. Whenever that happened, his only choice was to move again.

Several friends who were detained with him were later sentenced to three to eight years. He was earning good money and raising a family. But he was also in constant danger.

“At any time, they can make you lose everything,” Wang told The Epoch Times.

One time, he was going for a job interview when he spotted a man in black taking photos. Suspecting that the man might be following him, he gave up on attending the interview and left in a taxi.

Around 2016, he got a job that required him to travel so frequently that he didn’t see any other option but to risk applying for a new ID. He did so, but police harassment quickly followed.

He fled from China to the United States in 2018 with his wife and young son.

Courage

While possessing or distributing Falun Gong materials is crime enough for the CCP, those who smuggle out of China direct evidence of the persecution, such as photos, videos, and official documents, are treated particularly harshly.

In 2004, the world was shocked by the images of Gao Rongrong, a 36-year-old woman tortured to the brink of death at the Longshan Labor Camp, where she was held for practicing Falun Gong. In May that year, guard Tang Yubao shocked Gao’s face with an electric baton for more than seven hours, until it was burned and disfigured.

Gao’s niece Liu Ziyu, who was 16 at the time, remembers walking into the hospital room in August that year. Police officers were on guard inside and outside the ward.

When she saw her aunt, her mind went blank.

“I had never seen anyone so thin,” Liu told The Epoch Times. She could hardly contain her emotions. “She was just a layer of skin covering her bones.”

Liu had adored her aunt as a child. Gao was delicate, patient, quiet, and intelligent and tried her utmost in performing any task, Liu said. She was Liu’s role model.

Now, Gao had all kinds of tubes coming out of her body. Her face was full of wounds. She opened her eyes and looked at Liu.

Liu ran to the bathroom so Gao wouldn’t see her tears.

Liu stayed overnight and returned to Beijing the next morning to go to school, not knowing it would be the last time she saw her aunt.

Gao’s two sisters had smuggled in a small camera during their visit. Gao agreed to have them secretly photograph the wounds so the pictures could be smuggled out of China as evidence of the persecution. They were all aware they would draw the regime’s wrath by doing so.

They used a tool to circumvent China’s internet blockade to send the photos to Minghui.org, a Falun Gong website documenting the persecution.

Gao escaped from the hospital with another Falun Gong practitioner’s help. But a few months later, the police found and arrested her again. In June 2005, she was tortured to death.

Liu and her mother hardly ate for days after hearing the news.

The authorities insisted on cremating the body and pressed the family to sign the paperwork, threatening them with prison sentences and forcing Liu’s mother and another aunt to flee their homes. Her father, away in another city for work, didn’t dare come back.

At age 17, Liu was left alone, surviving on ramen noodles for months.

Under constant fear, she sometimes sunk into depression. She recalled how she’d stand by the window and stare endlessly at the sky.

Because of her connection to the exposure of Gao’s torture, Liu was on Beijing’s travel blacklist. In 2007, she earned a chance to study in Canada, but was blocked from leaving China at the airport on grounds that she had “broken national law.” By that time, she'd already had to leave her school in China. Her higher education was effectively derailed.

After many failed attempts, Liu managed to escape to New York five years later.

Liu is now 37, the age when Gao was killed. She has wondered many times how she would have fared had she been in her aunt’s shoes. Would she have made the same choice?

Every time, her answer is the same.

“Falun Gong isn’t wrong, and truthfulness, compassion, tolerance aren’t wrong,” she said.

If she’s doing the right thing, Liu said, then she can’t “cave to the evil’s oppression.”

“They can destroy my family, they can destroy my future, they can destroy my life, destroy everything I have, but the only thing they can’t take away and can’t destroy is my faith.”

Looking to the Stars

For practitioners living under the communist regime, holding on to their belief in many cases means having to part with their loved ones.

He Zhiwei fled her home amid a wave of arrests of Falun Gong practitioners in 2001. She barely saw her daughter, Feng Xiaoxin, then 13, over the next 12 years.

Around the Chinese New Year in 2002, she called her daughter. But the phone was wiretapped, and both He’s mother and daughter were arrested shortly after.

She knew something had gone wrong when her calls went unanswered. After learning of the arrests, He went sleepless for nights, weeping.

“She was so little,” she said. “As a mother, I couldn’t be near her when she most needed me.”

A few years later, He tried to return home, only to be arrested and sent to jail for a year.

She was tied to a chair with a camera monitoring her every activity, including relieving herself, she said.

The police accused her of abandoning her family.

“But who caused this to happen?” she said. “I wanted to fulfill my duty as a mother, but I didn’t have a way.”

In 2012, He was arrested again and sent to a labor camp. As a Falun Gong practitioner, her letters were intercepted by the guards, but a sympathetic prisoner in her cell once secretly brought a letter from her daughter. It was a drawing of a mother sitting on a mountain, facing the ocean, with stars shining overhead.

The stars represent hope. “She wanted me to remember the stars and keep a hopeful heart,” He Zhiwei said. “It was a big help.”

Praying for Help

The Falun Gong practitioners interviewed for this story shared many examples of narrowly escaping arrest or detention. The circumstances were often so unlikely, they credited them to divine intervention.

Shi had several such experiences.

One time, she was staying at a friend’s apartment. One night, her friend, who was also a Falun Gong practitioner, didn’t return home as expected. When the clock struck 11 p.m., Shi became anxious. She quickly moved all their Falun Gong materials into a basement storage compartment.

It turned out her friend had been arrested. The next day, after Shi went out to run an errand, police came and ransacked the place, but found nothing. Her friend was released.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the city Shi lived in was hit with a month-long lockdown. It would have been impossible for her to get through check points and enter her building without producing an ID. Fortunately, the friend she was staying with worked at a supermarket and was able to obtain enough food for both of them.

Leaving China likewise wasn’t easy. In 2024, Shi’s family drove south to another province, knowing they probably wouldn’t be allowed to leave through the airport in their home city. Still, they were blocked from boarding the flight.

“You can’t leave. Don’t you know what’s wrong with you?” the police told them. They took the family’s phones, saying they were waiting for 610 Office’s instructions.

As her daughter and son-in-law tried to reason with the police, Shi silently prayed. After an hour of detention and questioning, the police relented. The family rushed through the gate just as the door was about to shut.

On the fifth day of the Chinese New Year, Shi’s family gained their freedom, leaving Chinese shores for the United States.

Escape

Traveling abroad can be difficult for Falun Gong practitioners. As the regime sees it, each of them is a witness to the persecution, harboring information that could damage China’s image overseas.

It’s not clear, though, how exactly the traveling blacklist works. Some believe individuals are taken off the list after some time. Some believe there are different local lists in addition to a national one. It also appears that some data are lost in various database overhauls. It may also be that some people are overlooked due to plain bureaucratic disorganization.

Those blocked from leaving by conventional means sometimes take a more desperate route—sneaking across the border to Burma (also known as Myanmar) and then to Thailand.

After getting out of prison in 2013, He Zhiwei moved four times in four months to evade persecution. In the end, she decided to escape with her daughter.

“No identity, and constantly facing arrest—I didn’t want to keep living like this anymore,” she said.

They carried all the cash they could get in special pockets inside their pants and set off on a bus to Jinghong, a city 1,000 miles away on the border with Laos and Burma. They stayed in black hotels, nearly getting reported to the police by a hotel staffer, and finally made their way across the two borders with the help of three guides over six days.

To get to Thailand, they bushwhacked their way down a slippery mountain at night and in the rain with only a small light on their phone. Then, a guide rafted them across a river before they squeezed into a four-seater car with a dozen others. Finally, they were directed to crawl through a square hole in a tour bus lavatory wall into a hidden compartment, packed with 10 to 20 people. After the hole was snapped shut, the space turned utterly dark, except for faint light gleaming through the cracks around the hole cover.

“It was depressing,” He’s daughter, Feng, said.

He Zhiwei, at just five feet tall, sat with her head bent to fit under the low ceiling. The people were packed so tightly that Feng had her head on somebody’s bottom and another person’s head was on her feet. Even with air conditioning, the air was nauseating. Two Thais next to Feng, a man and a woman, both vomited on the way.

The bus stopped frequently to let in regular passengers or border guards making inspections. In complete silence, they listened to the steps above. Near dawn, some 10 hours later, they were let out into the normal passenger seats before finally reaching Bangkok.

Feng felt liberated, as if all the discomfort of the journey suddenly left her.

“Finally, it is over,” she thought.

The next day, they went to a park to do the Falun Gong exercises. The world was breathing freedom, it seemed to He, as she watched little birds hopping around their feet.

“They aren’t a bit afraid,” she thought.